


and they say I'm the prickly one

by kwritten



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Dark Imagery, F/F, Femslash, Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:00:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for the prompt: Johanna/Katniss "it's like living with a hedgehog"</p>
            </blockquote>





	and they say I'm the prickly one

She can sometimes still feel the earth fall away under her feet and there's nothing but water and water and water everywhere.   
  
They say she lost her mind when she saw a decapitation.   
  
They're full of shit.   
  
She is a warrior forged through breeding and training and long, endless nights of desensitizing herself to the brutalities of the flesh. Blood flowing and flesh breaking and bones snapping are the elements she is made of.  
  
Blood is simple and tangible. It means everything because it is everything.   
  
(Her parents were Victors she played in the Village they killed themselves with drink only after they instilled in her a desire to kill for glory - for honor. There aren't wars anymore. But there are still warriors. So you should be one.)  
  
It wasn't the death that drove her mad.   
  
(If she even is mad - she hears them say things like that and she retreats into her smiles and her dreamy silences to keep them away.  
  
They think she is mad she knows she is smart.)  
  
Death is easy.  
  
It was the moment that she realized that everything she fought for wasn't up to her - everything was in the hands of someone who cared fuck all about warriors and loved death in a way she'd never understand. It wasn't a love forged in the sweet smell of blood and the screams of pain, it was an obsession born from a sense of entitled power.   
  
  
  
As she swam and swam and swam in the waters that rose and rose she lost control.  
  
It slipped through her fingers like water.   
  
(She never said she didn't have a sense of humor.)  
  
And she left it there on the ground. (Or she told them that she did. Even she isn't sure anymore which part is the performance and which part is her.)  
  
The thing schoolchildren don't realize is that it's one thing to be a warrior and kill with deadly ability. It's quite another to be a warrior that makes the camera  _want_ you to kill with deadly ability. (She trained for this. She knows. She smiles at the camera it is her old friend.)  
  
  
  
  
She stopped trying to kill for them and made them want her to survive.  
  
(Each generation thinks they were the first to discover this.   
  
They'd be fucking wrong.)  
  
  
  
  
There aren't cameras anymore. (Or him. Her sweet Him with the eyes and the hair and the knowledge of blood the way she knew blood and performance the way she clung to performance.) But there will always be eyes.  
  
There's still a Victor's Village, but this one isn't hers with the memories that come haunting and the flowers that come teasing her with forgetfulness. She resides in the space with ghosts that don't belong to her for once.  
  
Funny how it feels all the same.  
  
  
  
'You can't seriously be shipping me off to Loonyville with her?!"  
  
"Johanna - someone has to check in on her once in a while. It looks good if the Victors are all still..."  
  
"Right fucking friendly and kissing each other's cheeks like we weren't made by your asses to kill for fun?"  
  
"It's good publicity."  
  
"No. It's strategy. You're putting all the live wires in the same place because you have something up your sleeve."  
  
"You could leave Annie here in the Capital with me--"  
  
"Fuck you Gale."  
  
  
  
  
Johanna never let Annie go anywhere without her.   
  
(It explains her new and improved colorful vocabulary.)  
  
And so the two of them take the deluxe train out to Katniss' hidey-hole.   
  
As a matter of friendship or politics or publicity.  
  
  
  
  
It's like living with a couple of fucking hormonal idiots.  
  
The yelling never stops.   
  
She starts to be able to actually  _see_ the moments when they break each other's hearts over and over again.  
  
  
  
  
"I don't play well with others."  
  
"You play fine with me."  
  
"I love you."  
  
 _I loved him._  
  
"So just love her."  
  
"Like it's that fucking easy."  
  
"Then don't."  
  
"Are you saying I can't!?"  
  
"Then take care of her. Like you do with me."  
  
"She doesn't need taking care of."  
  
"Everyone does."  
  
"Try telling her that."  
  
"I expect it's a lot like telling you."  
  
"What did you say?"  
  
"So are we going down to dinner or not?"  
  
  
  
  
The slamming of doors becomes clockwork for her. She knows when to run to her room or escape into her mind by a certain scent in the air. She knows when to sneak into the kitchen and steal the fresh-baked cookies. She knows when to fill the stilted silence and by a quick glance when to back out of the room before she's seen.  
  
(She knows how to sneak the right comment in at the right moment so that they say the wrong thing to each other and storm off and the cookies are left all for her.)  
  
  
  
She knows how to look completely oblivious.  
  
(She got lots of practice over the years. She worried that Johanna would be the one who would see through the facade finally.  
  
Until the night Johanna stumbled in with red, puffy eyes and a torn dress ("tripped on the stairs") and a hickey on her throat and heartbreak in her eyes. She liked to fall for boys who had already given their hearts away.)  
  
(They didn't hide it well from her, Gale still visiting her with a smile and Johanna in the background pretending to flirt in her usual manner only everything from her mouth was tinged with bitterness and his jaw was set just a little tighter.)  
  
  
  
  
She's watched the others interact with them. Watched Haymitch pick away at the not-so-thick barrier Katniss keeps around her like a decorative mantle. Has seen the other Victors ply at Johanna's bright smile over the years.  
  
One of them is so very new at this you'd think that the other would be able to handle it better.  
  
Actually, no.   
  
They are both so very raw in all the same places for the same reasons.  
  
  
  
  
The girl who had nothing to lose.  
  
The girl who had everything to lose.  
  
And they both lost more than they bargained for.  
  
  
  
  
Peeta starts delivering baked goods to her instead of Katniss.  
  
Crazy widows are allowed a lot more leeway in the form of sugar and butter than embittered women who throw their fiances out the door in the snow and refuse to let them back in. (Not that he stopped delivering bread to her anyway.) (Not that she's sure Katniss would have cared if he did.)  
  
  
  
  
  
They like to make pointed comments about what the other deserves over her head as if she isn't in the room. She's a necessary prop in their twisted campaign against each other (they don't even know they are fighting a war) (they don't know it's one they'll both lose) because of her sweetness. (She hides her smile behind bites of cake.) Annie is the girl that every man would be lucky to have fall in love with them.  
  
They are everything men shouldn't love.  
  
Look at the wasted pathetic people they've become.  
  
Look at their hardness and their bitterness and their selfishness.  
  
  
  
They throw tantrums like children.  
  
They throw insults they know will stick because they are slinging at a mirror.  
  
  
  
(It doesn't even seem to matter if they want anything at all.   
They don't deserve the love they receive.  
They don't deserve the love they crave.  
They are undeserving.  
They are monsters.)  
  
(They belong in the Arena.)  
  
  
  
She laughs at this and dreams of blood and water.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She sees where this is all heading long before they do. She urges them towards it in her own small way, being underfoot the way she is.  
  
It's like a novel running it's course right in front of her eyes.  
  
  
  
  
They like to sulk behind closed doors and it gives her free reign of the house. She rearranges furniture. She paints a room or two. They hardly notice, coming out only at night - trying to avoid each other but doing it in the same, silly ways.  
  
They like to sulk in the sun, sprawled out on the floor like cats - hurling insults at each other with waning venom.  
  
  
  
  
She paints her room ocean blue.  
She's not going anywhere anytime soon.  
  
Johanna can't leave her side.  
  
(She won't leave theirs.)  
  
  
  
  
(There's cookies here.)  
  
  
  
  
The day she walks into the room and their legs are tangled all up in each other's.  
  
They volley insults back and forth occasionally.  
  
Johanna likes to talk and Katniss does not.  
  
They even each other out that way.  
  
  
  
  
Annie plans on painting the kitchen yellow.  
  
She doesn't tell Peeta to get the paint quite yet.  
  
She has to wait for the next period of sulking hibernation.  
  
  
  
  
It should come soon enough.  
  
  
  
  
  
For now, she waits and watches. (And sees more than just the love bites on Johanna's shoulder and the way the shadow over Katniss seems to have lifted ever so slightly.)  
  
  
  
  
She can see their kills spread out before her like they were made just for her. And in them she sees a symmetry that no one else can see. She doesn't need to go back to old records to see it.  
  
She can read the patterns in the blood. She paints the patterns herself.  
  
And their's is just beginning.  
  
This is her control.  
This is the dam that keeps the floods from rolling in.  
  
  
  
This is her peace.


End file.
